They were communist agents trained — and surgically enhanced — to seduce the West’s Moneypennys and Bonds. Lauren St John finds out what went on between the sheets behind the iron curtain

In the mist-shrouded forests and mountains of Transylvania, home to the castle of Bram Stoker's Dracula, a more modern myth, dating from the cold war, has survived down the generations. This, some say, was the location of an extraordinary "sex school", one in which the most beautiful and handsome of cold-war spies were trained in lovemaking before being sent forth to seduce and inveigle secrets from western diplomats and agents. In the mid-1960s, one American author claimed he'd been taken to one such school, housed in a former royal hunting lodge outside Brasov. He alleged that it had a curriculum of sex studies run by the Romanians and that at least three of its young students were jaw-droppingly beautiful.

It takes only a cursory examination of the history of Transylvania's former royal hunting lodges to establish that the possibility of any of them ever having housed a college for 15-year-old